Through the two months between the blowing up of the _Maine_ and the declaration of war I vacillated between hope that the President would succeed in preventing a war and fear that the savage cries coming from the Hill would be too much for him, as they were in the end. I honestly believed then as I do now that he was doing his best, and this in spite of the fact that my heart was hot with resentment for what I considered his cowardly desertion of my Poland friends in 1893. McKinley was patient, collected, surprisingly determined. Everybody indeed in the departments where the brunt must fall if war came seemed steady to me, as I watched things in my frequent visits to General Miles’ Headquarters. Everybody was at his post, everybody except Theodore Roosevelt, Assistant Secretary of the Navy. He tore up and down the wide marble halls of the War and Navy Building—“like a boy on roller skates,” a disgusted observer growled. More than once he burst into General Miles’ office with an excited question, an excited counsel. Already he was busy preparing his Rough Riders for the war to be if he had his way. Already he saw himself an important unit in an invading army. I remember this because it shocked me more than anything else I was noting. What chance had government in peace or war if men did not stay on their jobs? Was not fidelity to the trust committed to you a first obligation? And if Theodore Roosevelt felt—as he evidently did—that he was needed in the Army, did not good manners if nothing else require resignation? I was very severe on him in 1897, the more so because he had bitterly disappointed me in 1884 when he had refused to go along with the mugwumps in the revolt against Prohibitive Protection, refused and gone along with my particular political abomination, Henry Cabot Lodge. I had not been able to reconcile myself to him even when as a Police Commissioner of New York City he made his hearty and effective fight on the town’s corruption. The steadiness of General Miles and his staff in the weeks between the blowing up of the _Maine_ and the breaking out of war with Spain raised my respect for Army training as much as Roosevelt’s excited goings-on antagonized me. At the same time my contempt for the outpouring of Congress in a crisis was modified by almost daily association with one of its oldest members, the Senator from Massachusetts, George Frisbie Hoar.